The Honest Man
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day three hundred and eighty:  RMM 1/8  Burt has always known who is son was, and it's always been on his mind.


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 18th cycle. Now cycle 19!_

**READ MY MIND SET** - _I've been wanting to do something like this, in some way, for a while now. Listening to the song "Read My Mind" by the Killers, there were a set of lines I thought might be good for inspiration, so...here we are! There will be EIGHT, four in the first week of this cycle, four in the third/last.  
_**TODAY:** _"The Honest Man"_

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**"The Honest Man"  
Burt & Kurt **

There wasn't one day that went by where he didn't ask himself one or two of these same questions, each one of them regarding his son.

He'd wonder if things would have been the same between him and Kurt if Liz hadn't died. It wasn't as though he envisioned 'distance,' but… The fact that she wasn't there, that they'd both lost her, it had brought them closer. They were all the other had, and that bond had been so very important. But Kurt and his mother, they'd been so close… He would not have been surprised if Kurt preferred to confide in her instead of him when it came to who he was.

Then he'd think, no, it wouldn't change, not where it counted. He would never see his boy as anything but his flesh and blood, as one whose joy and happiness brought him those same things as well as hope and pride. That was in no way affected by losing Liz.

All the same, he'd known who his son was before the loss, too. Whether he chose to recognize it or not, whether he understood it or not, he knew. He was just a little thing, three or four years old, but he was Kurt, the Kurt he would grow to be. He loved him, so it was never a factor to worry his mind over when it came to just the two of them. He knew it wouldn't be easy to reconcile reality with certain… expectations for his relationship with his son. Overall it would prove itself an ongoing challenge, but it didn't bother him.

It was the others… there were plenty of people out there who would go and tell him it wasn't okay to be who he was and that he should be someone else, for their sake alone. He would have given anything to protect him from that, all of it, but it was impossible. It was as nasty of a problem as they came… it spread all around them, one problem dealt with only to be replaced with another… He'd fight for his son wherever and whenever he could, but sometimes Kurt would have to solve his own problems, without him… and where it should have brought pride in how he could take care of himself, it still didn't soothe Burt's concerns.

So then the question became whether he should have said something to him, to Kurt, way back when… In part he did want to leave it up to Kurt to choose to tell him… and still part of him would have wanted to be wrong on his assumptions. But he just thought of all those years, when they were both keeping silent, where he could have been supporting him instead of letting him go through difficulties or sadness… Whether or not he, Burt, needed time to adjust, the way he saw it now, Kurt could have needed him a lot more.

In the end, regret was all it could ever be. He couldn't go back and change things which had already taken place. The best he could do was to look to what was ahead, especially as certain things changed.

He had no idea what Glee Club was until the day Kurt came home to say he'd joined it. Once he'd explained it though, Burt could remember Liz telling him about being in a choir like that in high school. Suddenly there was a lot more music in their home… One day though, the loudness of it had drawn Burt to go down into the basement.

He saw Kurt, the girls… He didn't particularly know how to respond. Kurt was saying one thing, but he saw another. For a time, he was sufficiently distracted by the football aspect of things that he got carried away. Sitting there in the stands, staring down at his son, his boy, it was like watching a baby thrown to the wolves… He was thinking about it all… the wish to protect him… He had to feel he'd be fine, that he wasn't going to be pancaked by the others, towering over. But then like any time before, his son had shown him he could do so much more than what people expected of him… He was okay.

That was the night the silence stopped. That was the night Kurt told his father he was gay, and Burt told his son that he knew, that they were going to be okay. Now that it was out there, he knew things were going to change; they had to, they should. What should change… and what should stay the same… That was his love for his son, and it would always be; it had always been.

THE END

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**_[A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, story alert won't get you anything! ;)]_**


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